A word on Analytics

[444B]

I have been trying to integrate other analytics tools into SA2 for a while now and have tried every method conceivable and described in the forums.
I have not succedded to get a little bit of JS to work.

However, In my recent attempts to get it functional - I was looking at the st.context function and found some very interesting things.

import streamlit as st

st.title("HTTP Headers")
st.context.headers

st.title("HTTP Cookies")
st.context.cookies

The following is provided from the client to your streamlit server with anytime someone views your page or presses a button

HTTP Headers

{
   "Host":"REDACTED",
   "User-Agent":"REDACTED",
   "Accept-Encoding":"REDACTED",
   "Accept-Language":"REDACTED",
   "Cache-Control":"REDACTED",
   "Cookie":"ajs_anonymous_id=REDACTED; _streamlit_xsrf=REDACTED; _streamlit_xsrf=REDACTED",
   "Origin":"REDACTED",
   "Pragma":"no-cache",
   "X-Request-Id":"REDACTED",
   "X-Real-Ip":"REDACTED",
   "X-Forwarded-Port":"REDACTED",
   "X-Forwarded-Scheme":"REDACTED",
   "X-Original-Uri":"REDACTED",
   "X-Scheme":"REDACTED",
   "Sec-Websocket-Version":"REDACTED",
   "Sec-Websocket-Key":"REDACTED",
   "Sec-Websocket-Extensions":"REDACTED",
   "Sec-Websocket-Protocol":"REDACTED",
   "X-Original-Proto":"REDACTED",
   "X-Forwarded-Proto":"REDACTED",
   "X-Forwarded-Host":"REDACTED",
   "X-Forwarded-For":"REDACTED",
   "Proxy-Connection":"REDACTED",
   "Connection":"REDACTED",
   "Upgrade":"REDACTED"
}

Cookies

{
   "ajs_anonymous_id":"REDACTED",
   "_streamlit_xsrf":"REDACTED"
}

I beleive the way to prevent these cookies and the ajs_anonymous_id from being embedded in your client is to set
[browser] gatherUsageStats = false
in the .steamlit/config.toml. I have tested that and it works.

I do wonder if we could use these values to make SA2 more meaningful however a key point here is that analytics seems to be easy for Streamlit to do for themselves but impossible for any users of streamlit.

[emigre459]

Kind of related, but I've been trying to get analytics using streamlit-analytics at the session/user level instead of what seems to be in aggregate across all sessions/users (I'm still testing locally, so please correct me if that's wrong, but I don't see any unique ID that would track clicks at the session level). Is there any planned functionality for that? I'm currently tracking visitors by using UUID session IDs and setting a cookie in the client browser and then using firestore to track user-level clicks, but it's not playing nicely with other packages currently (namely streamlit-authenticator or perhaps the underlying CookieManager).

Would there be any interest in a PR that could for example take a visitor_id string as a kwarg to track and start_tracking that could then be used as a document ID in place of "counts" in Firestore? I'm not sure how it would need to adjust (or even if it could) to also work for the non-firestore use case though...